Читать книгу A Quiet Life - Natasha Walter - Страница 11

‘I get the feeling your boyfriend is not treating you well,’ Winifred said to Laura the next day as the two girls walked up to Highgate High Street to do some errands. ‘And I must say – my last dinner with Colin was dull as ditchwater. The wages of sin are boredom, don’t you think?’

‘Well,’ said Laura, ‘it’s true – it’s not …’ But she tailed off.

What could she say? After the last meeting with Florence, she had gone once or twice to other gatherings of the Party in King’s Cross or Holborn. They had been full of speeches that constantly returned to abstraction, that never delved into the experiences that had brought her and, she assumed, others into the room. Even when she had sat with the other comrades over tea in the basement office, the conversations had been so far from the exquisite insights of Florence’s discussions on the Normandie that she had almost cried with frustration. Instead, they had been mainly about procedure, with a great deal of discussion about who was on the right lines, and who was being bourgeois or deviationist or showing ‘Trotskyist tendencies’ in their approach. In all of this Laura sat in unbroken silence, and Florence herself said little, while Elsa was almost the only woman who raised her voice at all.

And the more she saw of Elsa, the less Laura could warm to her. There was the obvious scorn she showed towards those who did not come up to scratch, her grey serge dresses that smelled of sweat, the glasses she kept twitching up her nose. Laura knew she was wrong to judge Elsa in what Florence would tell her was a petty, individualist way, but she could not help herself, as she sat watching Elsa, and watched Florence watching Elsa, and saw Florence take on – without, Laura thought, knowing that she was doing so – some of the little mannerisms and turns of phrase that characterised Elsa’s speech.

‘Don’t worry – you can keep him secret if you like.’ Winifred broke in on her long silence.

Laura realised she had to say something, given how generous Winifred was being in helping her to meet her imaginary boyfriend, and so she began to tell a story in which the boyfriend took on the face and opinions of Joe Segal. At one point she mentioned something that he had said about communism, and Winifred laughed and told her she had been having a similar conversation with a friend of hers the other day.

‘Cissie – can you believe, not a political bone in her body, really – had picked up some of that stuff. I told her to leave it well alone. Communism – can you imagine a more humourless, miserable way to live? I don’t just mean no shopping. But the point is, some people really are special, that’s the truth, and those are the ones who need to run the show. I don’t know why it is that so many people at the moment seem to think it’s the answer to bring everyone down to the lowest level.’

Laura was about to jump in, about to tell Winifred that communists didn’t think that nobody was special, but luckily she caught herself in time. The last thing she wanted was for Winifred to start arguing with her about communism even before she had it straight in her own head, and when she was feeling so … what was she feeling? Just then they came to the bookshop where Winifred was to find a particular novel for Aunt Dee, and Laura was able to go to the back of the shop where the poetry was kept, and under the pretence of browsing she went on with her train of thought.

Why was it that she had kept Florence and Elsa and the Party secret from Winifred all this time? Deep down, she realised this could not go on. Sometimes everything came straight. The pamphlet that Florence had lent her recently had laid things out for her in a beautiful order, showing that one did not have to accept the corruption and dishonesty and the stifling soullessness of the world as it was. While she was reading, she had said to herself, I’ll join the Party properly, and tell Winifred, and move out and throw in my lot with Elsa and Florence. That’s what I’ll do. But once she had put the pamphlet away and gone out of her bedroom, she could not even form the words in her head that she would say to Winifred. The great impetus left her whenever she thought about living in the way that Florence and Elsa lived, rushing from tedious meeting to meeting, and returning to that cheerless apartment in the evenings. Just then, Winifred called to her and she put the book that she was pretending to look at back on the shelf.

After leaving the bookshop they walked up to the top of the hill where there was a dressmaker above a flower shop. Winifred bought most of her clothes ready-made, but wanted a dress altered for a dinner party that she was going to that weekend. They stood in the dusty light of the dressmaker’s room while Miss Spark pinned up the hem of the dress.

‘And I think I want these ruffled sleeves taken off,’ Winifred said. ‘What do you think, Laura? I could have it sleeveless.’

Laura had hardly been looking, but then she suddenly saw Winifred turning to view herself in the mirror, her neck rising out of the stiff green silk like a straight narcissus breaking out of its leaves. Miss Spark was trying to convince her to put some trimming in place of the sleeves, taking out a length of white net that she thought would be right, and some small white silk roses, but Winifred looked at them and discarded them, turning around again in front of the mirror, lifting her arms. No, not a flower, Laura thought. A bird.

‘I’m sorry you can’t come to the dinner,’ Winifred said as they walked down the stairs back to the street. ‘Giles was reluctant enough to take me – not that he’s taking me, of course, his friend Alistair is. One of the Initiates.’

Laura looked rather than asked the question, and Winifred explained how Giles and his very best friends had belonged to a society at university called the Initiates. ‘All they mean, I think, is that they are initiated into adoration of one another; it’s not that they are all that special, or all that gorgeous, or that successful, but you know what men are like – they need these secret societies, these movements and cliques, to feel comfortable. Wouldn’t life be nicer if people didn’t need all of that? Clubs.’ Winifred’s voice dropped into scorn on her last word.

Just at that moment the two girls had entered the park between the high street and Aunt Dee’s house, and Laura stopped in surprise. On the way up, a morning fog had covered it, but now the air had cleared. For the first time she saw London revealed as a place of potential beauty, in this park full of its layers and layers of different greens, both deep and transparent, opening onto that now almost familiar view of a secretive city down below. She said how lovely it was, and Winifred casually agreed. As they walked on, Laura kept looking out at the city, its promise of energy, its distant song of movement, and she wished that she were able to go into it that afternoon rather than do what they were expected to do – go home and be idle in the over-upholstered living room, reading and playing cards. She knew that Florence and Elsa were preparing for a big concert for aid for Spain, and she longed to be with them. Even if in practice the preparation only meant the repetitive business of stuffing envelopes and typing out address labels, still it might hold purpose within it, and on this day full of the brimming hope of spring she longed for a sense of purpose.

As soon as they got into the house, Laura realised she was not the only one who was feeling out of step with the Highgate house. Winifred had seemed good-humoured while they were walking outside, but when her mother told her she had got her the wrong novel she slammed it down on the table and insisted that this had been the title they had discussed. Although Laura had seen Winifred irritated before, this was the first time that her voice had crackled into real anger. Perhaps, Laura thought as Winifred ran upstairs to her room, shouting about her mother’s unreasonableness, the decorum of the household had been partly a response to her presence, as if everyone had been determined to put on a good show for the new onlooker. But now she was no longer new, nobody could be bothered to keep up the façade. The bitter atmosphere continued over supper, when Aunt Dee complained about the amount that Winifred was spending on dresses and Winifred countered by telling her that it wasn’t her fault she wasn’t allowed to earn any money.

The following Saturday, the day that Winifred was going to the big dinner party, Laura came down to breakfast to find the atmosphere between mother and daughter had curdled completely. ‘I can’t believe that you’d try to stop me again …’ Winifred was saying.

‘It isn’t me, dear; it’s the way that the world is. Laura, we should really talk about this too … Polly’s last letter was definitely concerned, and I think she’s right, that we should think about booking you a passage back quite soon. There’s no hope of visiting the Continent while things are as they are, and I really think that—’

‘Just because we can’t go to France in the summer doesn’t mean that I have to give up my place at university.’

‘Do you mean you’d like me to go back?’ Laura was, to her surprise, horrified at the thought. Suddenly she realised how she had got used to the pleasures of this life – on the one hand, the comfortable round of shopping and gossip, social engagements and visits, in which the expectations on her were easy and undemanding; and on the other hand, all the time there was the possibility of her next meeting with Florence, the sporadic crossings into a world where the future was being made and her growing familiarity with their discussions of the new world to come. But her horror was silent, confined inside her head, while Winifred was openly furious, the words tumbling out of her.

‘I know, you say it’s the war coming, and before it was because of your chest pains, but don’t you see, Mother, it can’t always be about other things – it has to be about me too. I can’t stop living, I can’t just sit here my whole life because you sat at home all of yours …’

Laura stood at the table, unable to sit down, riveted by Winifred’s sudden honesty. How brave she seemed, in her green jersey, her hair pinned into curls in readiness for the evening’s party, arguing with her mother while coffee cooled in their cups. Laura was not surprised, however, when Dee said nothing at all in response. It was as though Winifred had not spoken, as she turned to Laura and asked if she would like a boiled egg with her toast. Even when Winifred stood up and, throwing down her napkin, stamped out of the room, Dee simply folded her lips together and told Laura she was probably over-excited about the evening. To her shame, Laura colluded in pretending that Winifred did not know what she was saying. She sat down and ate her breakfast, and listened to Aunt Dee talking about whether the gardener had been right to plant the lilies right up against the house like that – how would they get enough sunshine? Aunt Dee wondered.

After breakfast Laura went to find Winifred, who was sitting in the garden in the thin sunshine, pretending to read a book. She listened to Winifred’s complaints about her mother for a long while, and then reminded her that Dee had said it was time for Laura to go back. ‘I don’t want to,’ Laura said. ‘I really don’t want to.’

She wanted Winifred to say, I don’t want you to go either, but Winifred looked puzzled.

‘Don’t you? Is it about this man?’

‘I don’t know.’ Laura wished she could tell Winifred about Florence and all she meant to her, but she still held back. It would seem ridiculous now to confess that she had not been meeting some dashing man from the boat, and also she was afraid that Winifred would find Florence and Elsa and their politics absurd and would never understand the importance of what Florence had offered her. ‘Do you think I should go back?’

‘God knows. Mother thinks – like your mother I suppose – that it’s going to be 1914 and worse. Father was almost an old man, so he didn’t have to go, but the men they had danced with … I don’t have to explain, I’m sure you’ve heard enough stories from Aunt Polly.’

Laura could not tell her that her mother had never mentioned the war.

‘No wonder they married where they could – sorry, I’m sure your father is … it’s just Mother is such a snob, she thinks your mother only fell in with him because there wasn’t anyone left in England.’ Winifred turned to Laura, but she was unsmiling. ‘And this time – you know what they’re saying. Aerial bombs, all of that – but what are we supposed to do? We can’t stop the world.’

Just then Mrs Venn came into the garden, saying Giles was on the telephone for Winifred. ‘God, if he’s cancelling this evening, I tell you …’ and she stalked off.

But he was telephoning to ask if Laura could come with Winifred. Apparently the girlfriend of one of his friends was unwell, and so there was a gap for another woman at the dinner, and at the dance afterwards as well. Winifred accepted without even consulting her, and immediately she came off the telephone she called to Laura to come upstairs and look over what she would wear.

‘I suppose it is a bit of a winter dress, but it’s the right one,’ Winifred said eventually, after Laura had put on each of her two evening dresses and she had vetoed the grey one. ‘You don’t want to look like Jane Eyre,’ she said, and although Laura wasn’t sure of the reference, she could see that the dress she had thought of as silvery and subtle was in fact drab and drained her face of colour. Nobody could say that the red velvet dress was dull. Laura had bought it in Boston and had never worn it, but had been aware of it hanging up in the closet here in London, a brilliant rebuke to the dullness of most of her days. She wasn’t sure that she wanted to wear it. Looking at herself in the mirror, she could only see the dress, not herself, but Winifred was so certain that she gave it to Mrs Venn to be pressed.

After lunch Aunt Dee suggested that the girls should rest in their rooms before the evening’s outing. Winifred scorned the idea, and stayed reading in the living room, but Laura was thankful to be able to go upstairs. Lying on the big, high bed, she started re-reading old letters from her mother and Ellen. ‘I think you should book a passage for April,’ her mother had written. And now April was here. Laura laid the letters aside and wondered whether she was foolish to want to stay in London. It was true that nobody could ignore the sandbags on the streets and the trenches dug into the parks, not to mention the constant talk about what aerial warfare would be like and the Armageddon that would ensue. But despite the fatalistic talk, despite the physical reality of the city’s preparations, there was nothing concrete for Laura in the thought of war.

She looked into a drawer of the little desk where she had put the most recent pamphlet she had borrowed from Florence, Will It Be War?, which she had already started, but not finished. Its grand rhetoric, ‘Never, never will we bow the knee to fascism’, seemed too distant from her. Again she cast her mind back to the boat, and the moment when Florence painted for her a picture of what family and work might be like without false authority. That made sense to her; she felt it again, a taste of freedom, a world made in line with human desire. But the story of how they were all to fight as never before seemed dark to her, a summoning of something too large for her to comprehend. She found herself muttering some phrases from the pamphlet under her breath, as if she would commit them to memory to hold her to the right path.

Just then the handle of her door turned and Winifred came in, but to Laura’s relief she did not seem to notice her confusion as she shoved the pamphlet under her pillow. She had just come to suggest that Laura might want to start getting ready for the evening and that the bathroom was free. Shortly afterwards, lying in the warm water and looking down at her body, her skin greenish in the water that was reflecting the tiles around the bath, Laura felt a huge reluctance weighing her down. The little she had heard about Giles’s friends had not endeared her to the idea of meeting them.

Back in her room, she realised that the cherry-red velvet of the dress smelt of mothballs, as everything in this house did after a while. But it slithered with a cool touch over her breasts and legs as she pulled it on and zipped it tightly up the side. Lipsticking her mouth, looking for her pearl earrings, she was seeing herself only bit by bit in the mirror. Her lips – was the colour even? Her waist – did her garter belt show through the velvet? Her hair – should she push it behind her ears or fluff the curls forwards? But then, just as she was about to leave the room, she turned and saw her full reflection, as she had seen Winifred suddenly in the dressmaker’s, and was startled. It was such a complete picture, it was so finished. It was only for a second that she saw herself like that, and as soon as she walked out and Aunt Dee commented on her dress and asked her if she had a wrap, she lost the image completely. She was fragmented again; she had no idea how others saw her.

Giles was waiting for them in the living room, and she and Winifred followed him to his motor car, which was waiting outside. Laura had never seen London from a car before, and the city surprised her, rolling past the windows with a kind of emphatic repleteness, as if it were being unfurled particularly for them. Giles and Winifred talked in their usual sparring way in the front seats, but she was hardly listening and was surprised when finally the car stopped outside a terrace of vast white houses rising sheer into the dimming sky.

Once inside, Winifred introduced Laura to the man who she understood was her partner for the evening, whose girlfriend had been taken unwell. Tall, thickset, with a ruddy face and even, for all he was only Giles’s age, the suggestion of jowls.

‘Good of you to come out at such short notice,’ Quentin said to her. There was a note of condescension in his voice, clear enough for Laura to pick it out even in that room in which all the men seemed to speak with the same amused, arrogant tones. She was introduced to his father, who was a study in the fleshiness and loudness that Quentin himself was going to achieve, and to a Mrs Bertrand, a middle-aged woman with the most impressive black pearl necklace, who ignored Winifred and Laura and went on talking to the other two women who were already in the room.

Alongside Giles and Quentin was a young man who was bending to put a record on the gramophone. He introduced himself as soon as the needle started to whirl, and Laura realised that this was Alistair, the man who was partnering Winifred. He was the most engaging of the men, with elastic, exaggerated hand movements and round blue eyes that seemed to take in everything about the two girls. There was a generosity in that; to him, they did register, even if their presence was a matter of indifference to the others in the room. Behind him was an untidy, good-looking man who did not even bother to come forward to be introduced, but put his arm around Giles and started telling him what was obviously a racy story, judging by the way he lowered his voice as he came to the end of it.

Despite the presence of Quentin’s father and three other women, all the energy of the room came from the four young men, who seemed to be performing for one another, all talking at once, or almost, in quick, truncated sentences that would suddenly give way to protracted anecdotes, sustained as long as each could keep the floor. Laura had never been in such a relentlessly masculine atmosphere, she thought as they all moved to the dinner table. The women provided the colour between the black and white of the men’s tuxedos, but that was all they seemed to be there for; these flashes – green, scarlet, blush and blue – between the black coats.

Sitting at the dinner table as the first course was brought in, she thought she should say something to Quentin. ‘It’s your sister’s party we’re going to later?’

‘The redoubtable Sybil Last, indeed, her inevitable dance. Luckily, she has been persuaded away from providing entertainment for it in the style of last year … Do you remember, Alistair, the awfulness of the singers we were treated to then? The one good thing about the current situation is that no one thinks it’s appropriate to ship one’s entertainment over from France – too extravagant by far, not that that has ever put off dear Sybil … Do you remember, Giles …’ and another anecdote, interminable, emphatic, began to roll. Laura was careful to laugh in the right places, and that was as much as she could do.

Although later on Laura came to see each of them – Quentin, Giles, Alistair and Nick – as individuals, at this first meeting she could only see the set of friends as one cawing mass. She could not imagine feeling at ease with them and picked up her spoon almost in gratitude to have something to do. At the first taste of the soup, however, she found herself grimacing. It was a creamy, pale green soup, pretty in gilt-edged bowls, but maybe it had spent too long sitting in a warm kitchen. Something – the cream, the stock, the potatoes – had begun to turn, and a rotten taste filled her mouth. She laid her spoon down, as did others, but Quentin went on eating as if he had noticed nothing. Her unease grew as she realised how physically uncomfortable she was. She had only ever tried this dress on standing up, and now, sitting down, she was becoming increasingly aware that it was too tight for her, that the cut was too rigid over her ribs and that she had to keep her back ramrod-straight if it wasn’t to tear.

When the second course was brought in, she tried to speak for the second time, this time to Alistair, who was on her other side. ‘You all knew one another at university?’ she said, aware of what a lame gambit it was.

‘Knew each other – loved each other,’ he said with an exaggerated sigh. ‘And here we still are, together as ever. Giles the scientist, Nick the joker, myself the writer and Quentin – Quentin the arranger of festivities.’

‘What about Edward?’ Quentin boomed across Laura. ‘Just because he isn’t here, don’t forget Edward – what’s Edward?’

‘Edward, the philosopher – the absent philosopher.’

‘Why isn’t he here?’ asked Giles.

‘Have you only just thought to ask?’ said Quentin. ‘As a matter of fact, he’ll be at Sybil’s, but he said no to dinner … said he always has to work so late … said he couldn’t bear it … you know what Edward is like – the less …’ he waved his hand vaguely around the table, ‘the better.’ Not knowing Edward, Laura could not tell whether he meant the less female company, the less dinner, or the less gossip, but that was all right, since very little of the conversation made any sense to her at all. It was all about mutual friends, shared history and absurd tales of other social engagements.

All in all, Laura was relieved when the dinner came to an end and they set off for the dance. They were offered cars, but apparently the other house was only a few minutes away, and everyone exclaimed that they would rather walk. The other women had fur wraps, but Laura was glad, stepping down to the sidewalk, to feel the air on her bare arms. The scene, as they turned into a neighbouring square, seemed familiar, and suddenly Laura was thrown back in her memory: shouts of struggle, the police, women with their pots of paint and slogans. This was the very place she had come to during her first week in London, on that extraordinary protest. There was Halifax’s house. They passed it, and went on walking to another square, another row of white houses, and as they walked up the steps of one, the door was opened by a manservant. Beyond him was a wide hall painted turquoise, opening into rooms where lamps were reflected from mirror to mirror.

Here, Quentin’s father and Mrs Bertrand moved on and into the party, but their group took up a place in the first room, and once they had been supplied with champagne, the chatter went on much as it had done over dinner, the women providing simply an audience for the gestures and conversation of the men. All except Winifred, who, Laura was rather impressed to note, seemed to be enjoying swapping stories with Alistair. Alistair was the only one of the men who appeared to imply, by his voice and reactions, that the presence of the women enhanced the evening for him, and he was egging Winifred on to talk about Giles as a boy. More and more little groups came into the room, full of expectant faces, but their group stayed together and few people came to greet them. Then Laura saw a tall, light-haired man walk in and scan the room.

‘Edward! You made it,’ It was Quentin’s booming voice, calling the new arrival into the circle. ‘Why haven’t we seen you for so long? Has the Foreign Office been working you to the bone?’ The men shifted to allow Edward to join them.

‘Have you met our new friend?’ Quentin said, as Edward shook hands with each of the group. ‘Laura Leverett – Giles’s cousin – American heiress from Washington.’

Edward nodded, his light gaze passing over her. ‘Where is Sybil?’

The men looked around, and Alistair gestured to the other side of the room, where most of the guests seemed to be congregating.

‘Don’t rush off,’ Quentin said. ‘You haven’t told us anything, and we do need the inside track – now more than ever. What did Halifax mean yesterday? Is he really trying to charm Germany again?’

The group seemed to hesitate as they waited for Edward’s response. He paused to flick ash from his cigarette onto a silver ashtray on a mantelpiece, and then said, ‘He’s always wanted to avoid war …’

‘But cosying up now …’

‘Cosying?’

‘You see him every day, how would you describe it?’

Quentin seemed irritated with his friend, leaning towards him and frowning, but Edward was unresponsive, his head tilted back.

Alistair burst in. ‘If he was trying to negotiate a treaty, would the British public stand for it now?’

‘The great British public would welcome anything that let them off a fight, wouldn’t they?’ Nick gestured at someone for more drinks. As the servant came forward, breaking up the group as glasses were filled, Laura turned to Edward.

‘I’m not from Washington,’ she said, ‘and I’m not an heiress.’

‘But your name is Laura?’

She nodded.

‘Sybil,’ Alistair said suddenly, stopping a blonde woman who was walking past them. She was tall, in a curiously cut, stiff turquoise dress. Laura would not say she was pretty. No, her profile was too dominated by the long nose and the high forehead, but one wanted to look again at that face, to understand the secret of its attractiveness. Quentin turned.

‘I brought a new friend, Sybs – Nina was ill yet again.’

‘Nina telephoned me. I think she is still coming – and this is …?’

It was disconcerting to be addressed in the third person, Laura thought, as Quentin introduced her as carelessly as he had before. ‘Laura, Giles’s cousin,’ he said. She realised again that she was only there as a stopgap, as everyone now began talking about the woman whose place she had taken.

‘Nina takes to her bed for the attention,’ Alistair was saying.

‘Nonsense,’ Sybil stated.

‘Anyone less in need of extra attention …’ Nick said.

‘I think she is punishing me,’ Quentin said, with a theatrically pitiful expression.

‘Are you surprised? I did hear that you hadn’t treated her with chivalry, exactly.’

The comments continued in that vein, crossing and recrossing, and after a while Sybil walked on, not having acknowledged Laura or Winifred at all. Winifred raised her eyebrows at Laura, but Laura was feeling too overwhelmed to respond. To her surprise, it was Edward who addressed her next, as the others went on talking about Nina.

‘You’re not with the embassy, are you? I know some of the chaps in Grosvenor Square.’

‘No, I don’t work, I’m not – I just drifted here to visit family, you know. Not the best timing.’

Edward said nothing, but Laura pressed on, feeling the weight of her embarrassment lessen as she spoke. ‘My mother was keen for me to come – to see my cousins. But now she says I should go back. She’s cottoned on to the fact that things may not be totally safe. It’s taken her a while.’ Edward nodded, again saying nothing. ‘But it seems to be taking lots of people a while.’

‘To see what’s going on?’ Edward said.

‘Yes—’ Laura was going to say more, when she found Winifred at her elbow. She turned to her cousin, but when Winifred asked her how she was finding the party, she wasn’t sure what to say. There was glamour here, surely; the women’s backless dresses, the men in their tuxedos. And yet there was a secret to the evening’s energy that the others were responding to, as the colour grew higher in women’s faces and men’s voices became louder, which was eluding Laura. Instead, she was horribly aware of how uncomfortable she felt it was to be here as a replacement for a woman who – judging by the reactions to her illness – was clearly more of a character, more admired, than she would ever be. So she responded with some blank nothing to Winifred, and raised her glass to her lips, only realising as she did so that it was empty.

At that moment Edward took a silver cigarette case from his breast pocket. She took one when it was offered, just for something else to do with her hands. As Edward flicked the lighter, he spoke to her again.

‘This American chap I’ve got to know at the embassy told me that he thought London was the saddest place he had ever been. Do you think so?’

Laura wondered. This question resonated. She stepped backwards from the group as she considered it, looking at Edward. ‘Well, yes, – I wouldn’t know. But you do feel that people would rather not be living in these times. There is that.’

‘Rather Prince of Denmark.’

Whatever the exact meaning of his last remark, Laura took it to imply that he agreed with her. She waited for him to say more, but the pause that ensued seemed considering rather than empty. As they stood in silence, the conversations of the group continued beside them. This man’s laconic manner might seem offhand, Laura thought, but surely it was just that his rhythms were so different from the starling chatter of the others. While they were striving for effect, their voices tumbling over one another, he was driving at something else.

‘The time is out of joint,’ he said as if in elaboration of his last point, and though Laura could not catch his exact meaning, she caught, or thought she did, the thought behind his words.

‘Not for everyone, though,’ she said, and a great rush of feeling ran through her as she thought of how Florence and her friends saw opportunity even in the danger, the possibility of remaking the world in these forces sweeping over Europe. ‘Not if they see the struggle on two fronts, what it means for all of us.’ The words seemed to have risen through her, and she was not aware until she had spoken them how odd they might sound in that dimly glittering room.

‘The struggle on two fronts,’ Edward repeated the words, but she could not read his expression as he did so. Clumsily, she reached for another subject, wishing that she had not said anything so political. She had spent too long with that pamphlet this afternoon.

‘So, you were at university with Giles?’ It was a false, bright tone that came out with the words, and her tongue felt thick in her mouth. She wondered if she had already drunk too much, and if it was obvious that she had done so.

‘The struggle on two fronts: that isn’t Giles’s view,’ Edward said, and again she could not read his expression.

Laura tried to explain that she didn’t really know Giles that well, even though she was his cousin, and once Edward had made some polite response, she went on talking about staying with Winifred and how generous they had been to her. The ease she had felt between them had gone, though, and the small talk they were exchanging now was strained.

‘But, Last, didn’t Nina say to you not so long ago that if she was going to marry anyone it would be Quentin?’ That was Nick’s drawling voice breaking in over them.

‘The emphasis was very much on the if, as I remember.’ It was Giles who replied, smiling as he spoke, but there was sharpness there too.

‘We have to dance, really.’ This was Alistair. ‘Sybil told me; she said, I’m not having you all turning up and just standing there like a party of gawkers.’ Although he invoked Sybil, Laura could tell that in fact he was impatient to move away from his clique. Winifred and he moved off to the other room where a few couples were turning now to the music of a small band.

‘He only did that to get away from this lot,’ said Nick, motioning towards a couple of men who were coming towards the group, both of them in uniform. The two men who joined them seemed to be the target of some private joke in the circle, but they were perfectly friendly to Laura, and one of them was rather enthusiastic about the fact that she was American, telling her about a trip he had once taken to Boston and Maine. He was explaining to her at length the old cliché that Americans are so much more open and talkative than English people are, and then laughed with self-knowledge when he realised that she had said almost nothing as he spoke. When he asked her to dance, she was glad to move away from the little crowd around Quentin, who, she felt, had no interest in talking to her.

But after she had danced for a while she realised she had a stomach ache and, apologising to her partner, she moved away in search of a bathroom. The party was crowded now, knots of people standing everywhere in the two long rooms and in the entrance hall. A maid directed her upstairs to a bathroom, where she sat miserably for a while on the lavatory, feeling drunk and tired, before coming out and seeing herself reflected in the mirror. Just a fragment, again, just a flash; the lipstick worn off her mouth, a curl to tuck back.

Going down, she paused on the staircase, looking over at the gathering. ‘We’ll never see the like again,’ someone said, going past her, and although the person’s interlocutor quickly made clear – ‘Oh no, I think they are breeding in Shipston’ – that the comment was about horses, the words hung in the air as she looked down at the loud party.

Two women were just coming through the door from the street, one in a white satin coat, the other in grey. Laura recognised the one in white immediately. The face from the boat – unselfconscious, self-sufficient. She wore satin the same way she had worn a swimming costume, her shoulders well back and her movements quick as she shrugged her coat off into the hands of a waiting servant. Her companion was as pretty as she was, if not prettier, but it was Amy who held one’s gaze. Laura saw Sybil making her way through the guests to greet the two new arrivals.

‘Nina, you made it,’ she said to Amy’s friend. Next to her new guests Sybil looked dumpy, planted solidly on the carpet, but somehow it did not matter that she did not share their physical glamour, there was still some connection between them. The three women bent their heads together, whispering something, and then stepped back, laughing, looking at one another. They were the centre of the gathering, and as they moved through into the other room Laura saw many groups shuddering and re-forming, as people turned to greet them.

Walking down the stairs and entering the room behind them, Laura saw Quentin rushing forward to Nina, and bending almost double as he caught up her hand in an over-polite gesture. She stood irresolutely, watching them, and then walked on. She saw the RAF officer she had danced with earlier, now dancing with another woman, and she saw Nick and Giles in an entirely masculine group further on.

‘Would you like to get an ice?’ It was Winifred, taking pity on her, seeing her drifting through the party alone. Laura was glad of her company. She went with her and Alistair to eat a lemon sorbet from a silver dish and listen to them chatter. The evening dragged on like that until, very late, Winifred persuaded Giles to drive them back to Highgate. Winifred seemed to be riding high on the energy of the evening, talking over the gossip she had heard and pushing Giles for more stories about Alistair.

As she laid her cheek on the cold window of the motor car, watching the dark streets fall away as they drove, Laura felt rather ashamed of how awkward she had been all evening. What would it be like, she wondered, to feel that you belonged inside a party like that, inside the little group around Amy and Nina and Sybil, admired and envied, rather than uncomfortably wandering through the crowds in a too tight, too bright dress? Then she thought of Florence, and how scornful she would be of such a desire. Florence – she must ask her what that conversation about Halifax meant. And then she found herself remembering the odd exchange she had had with Edward Last. The struggle, why had she mentioned the struggle, so pointlessly? She had seen him again, late in the party, but he was sitting with Sybil and Amy. He had looked up at her as she walked past but had not made any move towards her. Was it his arctic blondness that seemed to set him apart from others, or that quiet manner? As she remembered their conversation, she pressed a finger on her lip, as if she could stop herself blurting out words that had already been spoken.